[Stoves] EWB Princeton in Huamanzana

[Charlie Sellers]

Hello everyone, and now I am REALLY grateful for all of your postings to the web over the years - I can access all of your expereinces easily, even from almost remote places in Peru!  The EWB Princeton student project building chimney stoves is in a little village past electricity, a few hours from Trujillo Peru.  It has 35 homes and is in a river valley in the foothills of the Andes - everything is just sand, stones, and ancient mountains with no vegetation - it only rains every 12 to 15 years here, and this winter there is just a trickle of water that is diverted for irrigation.  Huamanzana has almost no technology except for the small solar electricity system intalled by these engineers in the past - a few public place lights and a battery charging system for the batteries they use in the LED lanterns that each house was issued (it costs them $.30 USD every 2 weeks).
   
  We are building a custom plancha chimney stove for each household, basically based on the ONIL concept (though we have no plans for it or similar), since the submerged pot design did not work well last year (leaks, and too many different pot sizes).  Right now they cook in a trench between bricks, on a platform that the guinea pigs live beneath, and the copius smoke exits through the holey walls and roof (so the IAP issues are not as bad as I feared).  As usual they balance several pots at a time on the bricks, and feed scarce wood the size of your arms into the space too quickly.
   
  They will find the diminished response time, efficiency, fire visibility, and water boiling time of the future stoves to be dreadful, but we will make the stoves (sized to each cook) attractive to compensate.  I hope.
   
  No time for too many details here, but I would like to mention a few things that I could use a bit of help on:
  - ideas on the use of stone for construction, since they only use adobe now
  - stone or metal SIMPLE burners for burning their trash completely (same for making charcoal from biomass)
  - using biomass in a plancha stove, to save trees
   
  I only get email every few days in a small town a few hours away so send only a few (with a link or two - your time is valuable, and mine very scarce) to me at csellers42 at yahoo.com, as well as too the list if it might be of interest to all.  Just a few emails with key information would be great, to use the few materials I have (just bricks, floor tile, stone, cement, sand, some custom refractory brick luckily, and a bad blacksmith using scrap iron) to make the most difference.
   
  http://huamanzana.blogspot.com/
   
  Charlie Sellers
   
  Charlie




http://improvedstoves.blogspot.com/ - just R&D related to fuel efficient biomass stove issues
  http://travelswithcharlie.blogspot.com/ - most recent travel posts
http://new.photos.yahoo.com/csellers42/ - travel photos, of everywhere - click on the country albumns on the left
http://huiplesofguatemala.blogspot.com/ - my textile project in Guatemala - what colors!
http://travelswithcharlie2.blogspot.com/ - older travel posts, including Nepal travelogue 
http://ewbappropriatetechnology.blogspot.com/ - just posts for the ATDT of the EWB-SFP; AT for developing countries

       
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